


He Who Made the Lamb

by A_Diamond



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Angst, Bittersweet, Come Eating, Destiel Reverse Bang 2016, Endverse, Forgiveness, Hand Jobs, Implied/Future Canon Character Death, M/M, Past Castiel/Other(s), Past Dean/Other(s), Reconciliation, Reconciliation Sex
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-24
Updated: 2016-03-24
Packaged: 2018-05-28 09:24:22
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,193
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6323851
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/A_Diamond/pseuds/A_Diamond
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When Dean gets thrust forward into a vision of ruin, he disrupts the careful equilibrium of apathy and resentment that has become the norm between his future self and Castiel. In a moment of respite at the end of the world, a broken shell that used to hold an angel and a desperate leader who lost everything but his cause find absolution in a bond that, though tangled and frayed, has never severed.</p>
            </blockquote>





	He Who Made the Lamb

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Lekoppa](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=Lekoppa).



> All of the thanks to:
> 
> [Lekoppa](http://lekoppadraws.tumblr.com/), whose beautiful [art](http://lekoppadraws.tumblr.com/post/141578953219/title-he-who-made-the-lamb-author-alxdiamond) (also embedded in the story) inspired this work.  
> [Fic-me-senseless](http://archiveofourown.org/users/Fic_me_senseless), for the encouragement and solidarity.  
> [Hit_the_books](http://archiveofourown.org/users/hit_the_books) for wrangling the hell out of sentences that frequently got away from me (any remaining too filled with clauses to function are a result of my own stubbornness).  
> And always my lovely wife, for putting up with me.

“Are you coming?” Dean—his Dean, not the fresh-faced innocent thrown into their fucked up reality because Zachariah thought they made a convincingly deterrent morality tale—asked.

His gruff voice was demanding and his eyes were a hard challenge. Cas knew that combination well. Dean had brandished it moments after hanging up on his brother for the last time, when he’d summoned Cas with a curt prayer. Declaring the world closer to ending and the angel no less a virgin, he’d proposed a solution that even Cas’s bumbling naiveté couldn’t stymie.

Rough and desperate, their coupling had been everything Cas had imagined it would be. And if it was not everything he’d hoped for—a shameful secret he could not bear to be ashamed of even as his betters tried to burn it from him—if not that, it was at least enough. Every time that followed was also enough, even if Dean rarely spoke and never let Cas loose the soft, reverent words that tried to escape his lips as he gave himself over.

Dean had reprised that defiance with the news of Detroit, bitterly stoic as he avoided Cas’s attempts at comfort for days before exploding in a rage at the only angel left to blame—even if he wasn’t an angel anymore. Already reeling from his abrupt drop into humanity and the departure of everything that was what he once was, Cas had stood mute against the onslaught.

When Dean yelled at him to go, he went. When Dean called him and ordered him to “stop sulking and get your ass back here,” he obeyed. When Dean rebuffed Cas’s touch with disgust, then with hatred, and then with violence, he eventually stopped trying.

It was the same affectation he’d worn the first time Cas caught him sleeping around after that; and the same affectation, later, when he’d discovered Cas throwing himself into bed with every woman—and it was always a woman—Dean had graced with his company.

“I can’t tell if you’re trying to be me or fuck me vicariously,” he’d commented with an angry sneer, trapping Cas against a wall with just his looming presence, refusing to touch him even in violence, “but it’s fucking pathetic.”  

That was when Cas had begun to experiment with stronger intoxicants and multiple partners. If Dean had reacted to that at the time, Cas either hadn’t noticed or didn’t remember through the blur of highs and crashes.

He’d seen and heard the familiar mannerisms again the day Dean had been informed that he was replenishing his recreational stash out of pills that should have been their medical supply. Not at the time of the revelation; no, Dean hadn’t spared him even a glance when Chuck announced the slight but noticeable decline in their stores. It was hours after. Time enough for Dean to wrap up the meeting and storm out. Time to slam into a Jeep and leave camp on his own without telling anyone where he was going. And finally, to return nearly five hours later covered in grime, his bullets all spent, with a sack that rattled with censure when Dean cast it at Cas’s feet just inside the gates.

“Stay the hell out of the med cabin,” Dean had ordered, his voice no louder than usual but harsh with scorn; in the silence that had fallen over the camp, everyone scattered but watching the confrontation with rapt, vicious interest, Cas had known the condemnation would carry to all corners. Floating in an opiate haze—he’d anticipated a more volatile reaction, and figured he’d make it easier on both of them by raising his pain threshold and lowering his giving a shit threshold, so that Dean wouldn’t have to struggle with quite as much guilt after—Cas had grinned easily and dropped to the ground to sort through the cornucopia of stimulants, depressants, and painkillers.

He’d glanced up, on his knees before Dean, and the worthless human heart that should have been dangerously languid within his breakable ribs fought against the drugs to flutter fast and painful. When he leered to cover the unwanted emotion, Dean’s sneer had contorted further with disgust and he’d brushed past the fallen angel, leaving him alone in the dirt.

As such, the fierceness of Dean’s reaction to Cas’s comment came as no surprise. Anyone else in the camp—maybe excluding his past self, but only maybe—would see Dean as harsh, even angry as he questioned Cas’s loyalty to the cause; Cas’s loyalty to him.

But Cas had seen him through every heartbreak that had chipped away at the young righteous man behind him until all that remained was the tempered steel of his fearless leader. He knew better.

This was Dean at his most self-destructive, preparing to lose something he loved and refusing to show how much it devastated him. He was daring Cas to call his bluff, because he’d never been able to set aside his disbelief in Cas’s devotion. Once upon a time, his doubt had hurt Cas, but that had been easily resolved when he had given up his pride; one more forfeit at the altar of Dean Winchester, sacrificed in his name after faith but before hope.

Additionally, Cas had come to realize that Dean’s damage was his own damn problem and Cas’s failure to save him from it wasn’t quite the same thing as responsibility for it.

So when Dean glared at him in the grim war cabin, demanded, “Are you coming?” like he expected Cas to abandon him even now, Cas ignored the pang that tried to flare up through his chemical numbness. Instead, he offered the only thing he’d had left to offer Dean for years: a mortal body ready to be destroyed.

“Of course,” he said, because he could become no more complicit in his own demise than he’d been since he found a righteous soul shining in the Pit and grasped it tight. He’d started falling even as he flew through the fires, and had justified his cause as worthy. It had been, he just hadn’t yet realized that his cause was not God’s will, not even the will of Heaven. He would come to understand, in time and through suffering, that the angel Castiel had only ever existed to serve one man.

“But why is he?” Cas asked, glancing back at the interloper.

Dean’s glare had been swift and jealous when he dared admitting to liking the younger version. His fondness should have come as no surprise, after all; that was the version of Dean he’d first fallen for, and though they’d both changed, ground down and roughed up by each other’s jaggedness, Cas could never forget his first love. Even as Cas tried to justify his concern with the question of future repercussions, only half a lie, the look Dean speared him with made the previous one seem outright friendly. This was as close to hatred as anything between them had been in years.

Cas was never opposed to arguing with Dean for the sole purpose of forcing an emotional reaction—he’d take anger and frustration over apathy even at his most numb—but he hesitated to subject the younger Dean to that side of the older one. Maybe he’d become this again, maybe he wouldn’t, but he at least had time to stay the idealistic, if jaded, young man Cas had once met. Below the placid good humor he projected, assisted by a careful balancing of chemical interference, he boiled with fury that Zachariah was trying to hasten his loss of innocence.

“He’s coming,” Dean commanded.

Watching them glare at each other, the two versions of Dean—the one Cas had fallen for and the one he’d fallen beside—Cas saw self-hatred threatening to take the rare opportunity to turn external. He wasn’t sure he’d survive bearing witness to that civil war.

“Okay. Well, uh. I’ll get the grunts moving.”

Dean had long since stopped paying attention to him, so Cas didn’t bother with surprise when his departure earned the barest acknowledgement. He passed through the camp in much the same manner: people welcomed his presence only insofar as he was a messenger for Dean, then dismissed him without thought once his use was completed. It left him on edge, feeling as removed from humanity as he had been when he was an intangible watcher, metaphysically incapable of experiencing mortal sensation.

He itched to feel something other; more real, less real, either would be better than the untethered worthlessness settled in his chest. Ideally, he’d run into someone on the return to his cabin who would be willing to guide him back to the mocking shadow of what he once was, weigh him down into the physical and maybe even keep going long enough for Dean to come find them. He would spit with rage, but in it would be an unspoken acknowledgement of Cas’s necessity.

Or maybe he would leave them to it in disgust, having finally determined that dragging around a broken harlot of a fallen angel was more trouble than it was worth. All Cas could really provide for the cause anymore was occasional use as a decoy or a human—so very human—shield.

Worse still, Dean might not even look for him. He would discard Cas once and for all, deny him even the chance to die for something that mattered. Dean would break himself against the cliff that was Lucifer in Sam’s body and Cas would be alone, stranded in the wreckage that had once been Dean Winchester’s life.

The prospect was unbearable. Cas would find something in his cabin to get him through the next few hours without rendering him too useless, leave him available to be what Dean needed one last time after being the second worst thing that had happened to him for so long. It was a strange kind of honor, holding that title. He’d been a part of the impetus behind breaking the righteous man faster than the worst demons had managed. He’d have turned down the laurels if he’d had a choice; having none, all he could do was pretend not to feel the thorns biting ever deeper into his temples from behind broad leaves.

The silhouette waiting for him in the center of his cabin when he did return to it was rigid, back turned to the door but unmistakably tense with rage.

“Dean,” he said, but it came out like a sigh. If he was to be denied his final comfort, there was no one with a greater right to do it, but still he mourned what could have been in the face of his upcoming sobriety. At least Dean had come alone—his other self didn’t need to see just how bitterly they tried to destroy each other.

“Expecting someone else?” Dean asked, harsh and mocking, without looking at him. “Or multiple someones, more likely. Or maybe,”—and here he did turn, face an ugly sneer that couldn’t quite obscure the beauty Cas had always been able to see through the worst of his moods—“you were hoping for the younger, dumber model? I’d forgotten what a moron I was back then, but I guess I was stupid enough to fuck you. Of course, you were also an angel then, not a walking pharmacy with bonus syphilis.”

“Don’t worry,” Cas said with an ease he didn’t feel, “he’s still from the days when you carried condoms. He was a good little Boy Scout when I blew him behind—”

Dean slammed Cas’s back against the support beam just beside the door, in his space before Cas could react—slow human reflexes at an even greater disadvantage from the lingering effects of the narcotic cocktail he’d enjoyed in anticipation of his interrupted orgy.

“You don’t touch him,” Dean snarled. “You ruined me once, you don’t get to do that to me again.”

“That I wouldn’t touch him has nothing to do with you,” Cas replied coolly. His indifference had always riled Dean up faster than anything, even back when it was sincere and ignorant instead of affected for the sheer maliciousness of it. “Not your version of you, anyway.”

“Which means it’s about him.” Dean scoffed. “Don’t tell me the camp whore thinks he’s too good for any version of me to stick a dick in, even if it is the dumbest one.”

Slumped carelessly beneath Dean, Cas met his glare without wavering. “You may hate looking into the mirror and being reminded that you used to be something better, but I’ve never misunderstood my worth. I wouldn’t subject a good man to the camp whore; you and Zachariah are doing well enough demonstrating the dire need for him to cave to Michael’s demands and let his world burn without needing that kind of help from me.”

“You want to,” Dean challenged. Cas shrugged. Dean pressed on, “You play the martyr all you want, but if he wanted to compare virgin angel ass to the remnants of humanity’s condom, you’d bend over just as quick now as you did last time he saw you, five years ago.”

Something twinged, a sharp snap of insensible pain in his chest that corresponded to nothing but felt devastatingly physical all the same. The first time he’d felt it, newly human and vigilant over every ache, he’d interrupted Dean’s diatribe on Cas’s personal responsibility for everything going to shit to say, soft and worried, “I think I’m dying.”

“Good,” Dean had snapped. The pain had come again, more intense, and he’d rubbed at his ribs as Dean rolled his eyes and accused, “Drama queen.” Then Cas had understood, and though the feeling became his most frequent companion, he never mentioned it again.

“He didn’t,” he said now, pushing the words past his aching heart. “That version of you has never been intimate with any version of me. After this, he probably never will.”

Dean, surprised enough to lose the edge of his anger, asked, “Zach got him before he called you? How can you even tell?”

Cas didn’t know the answer to the first and didn’t want to make himself vulnerable by answering the second. Dean would react very poorly to an explanation of how Cas had left traces behind every time they coupled, even if it had been entirely unwitting. It hadn’t; Cas had seen how even when human, Anna had woven threads of presence around Dean’s heart and ribs.

As an angel, he had been a discreetly possessive lover, marking Dean in a way the man would have objected to had he known. Fallen, he could not have prevented his desperation from searing pieces of himself into the secret places of a Dean yet untouched by him.

He was jealously protective of the remnants he could still, graceless and useless, feel beneath his own Dean’s skin, so he ignored the questions and asked his own: “Why are we discussing him as a separate entity from you, while I remain synonymous with my past self?”

“Because that way you can fuck him without being the other woman to yourself,” Dean suggested, but his tone was more casual than cruel.

“If you don’t believe that I won’t do it for his sake, your sake,” Cas said, “at least have faith in my selfishness. I’m not quite masochistic enough to inflict that level of pain on myself in the past.”

Dean’s face remained heavily skeptical, but he didn’t ask. They traded stares, silent and heavy with familiar arguments, until Cas broke first; he’d done that more and more, since they started being whatever they were to each other.

“I loved you, even then,” Cas said. Dean flinched from the word, but he took no pleasure in it. “If I touch him here, now, when he goes back—I’ll know. I’ll see everything. That the first time he lay with me, it wasn’t me. That he was upset and unsettled and unsure of his desires and I was selfish enough to claim him regardless. I’ll see the abomination I become on this road and I’ll follow it anyway.”

Dean edged away and Cas followed, pressing the advantage until Dean was the one backed into a wall. “Do you want to compare ruin with me? I was endless, Dean. I was serene and untouchable and I threw it all aside—for you. And I’ll do it again, willingly, I’ll do it every time, but don’t—”

His voice stuck, cracked on a sob he would never breathe into life no matter how far he fell. He cleared his throat and tried again. “Don’t ask me to do it knowingly. Don’t make me consent to the full magnitude of my destruction before its time. Let me be a coward, Dean,” he begged softly. “Let me go into it blind.”

“Don’t come.” The words tore from Dean’s lips as though ripped forcibly out of his chest and up his throat. “Stay here, keep an eye on the camp, I’ll take—”

Cas silenced him in the only manner possible.

It had been years since he last kissed Dean. There were countless conflicts and partners between them now; a gulf stretching over the intervening time that had seemed impassable moments before. Suddenly, all the rest was meaningless. The hot, desperate slide of Dean’s tongue over his as their mouths opened to each other felt so familiar that everything else fell away.

Finally he pulled back, assured that Dean would be quiet while he caught his breath. “Nothing you say will stop me from going, from giving you your chance. Please,” he whispered against Dean’s lips, entreaty and command at once, “let me pretend I’m coming back.”

Dean shook his head, rocking the slight touch of their lips from side to side. “No more bullshit, Cas. I can’t. I’m sorry, I know it’s selfish but I can’t lie, not about this. I wish I could give you what you need, but I just—” He pulled away far enough that Cas could see the bitter twist of his mouth. “I’d give anything not to have you do this.”

Cas closed his eyes so he wouldn’t have to feel the weight of Dean’s guilty green gaze. “I know.”

“I’m still going to ask you to do it, though.”

“Yes.”

“And you will.”

“Always.”

“Fuck,” was a puff of hot breath against his cheek and, “Cas,” a prayer and denial both into the line of his jaw. The next words, trembling on the precipice of Dean’s lips, would bring them both to ruin if they reached the crook of his neck.

To stave it off, he reached for Dean’s coat and slid it off his shoulders. “Then give me this,” he entreated, sliding his hands under the hem of Dean’s shirt. His skin was warm beneath Cas’s palms. His abs tensed briefly at the touch, then he pushed into it, letting Cas bare his chest before returning the favor.

Soon they were both naked, and Cas guided Dean to the ground, bracing over him so their legs tangled together. Their faces hovered inches apart, and their cocks—just beginning to firm—brushed together.

Dean groaned, hips hitching up at the contact, but it twisted into regret as he let himself fall back and look up at Cas. “I must be the worst thing that ever happened to you,” he whispered, mournful.

Cas shook his head, lowered his cheek to rest against Dean’s and his hand to cradle Dean’s erection. His touch was tender but not teasing; it wasn’t that he needed to relearn Dean’s body—there wasn’t an inch of it he’d ever been able to forget—but he did plan to draw out his final opportunity to savor it.

“You’re the only thing that could have happened to me,” he said, tracing up and down with just the tips of his fingers.

“What—what the hell is that supposed to mean?” Dean forced the question out, very nearly breathless. Cas kissed him past it before answering, waiting until Dean’s arms wrapped around his back and Dean’s gasps panted hot and humid against his lips.

“My Father,” he said, and Dean complained (“Cas, don’t—”), but Cas silenced him with a slick stroke and a gentle bite high on his neck. Dean’s protest faded into a pleased moan, fingers digging into the flesh of Cas’s shoulder blades. Cas arched into the pressure, bruises claiming the eternally aching space where there should have been wings. He spoke again, murmuring into the soft curve of Dean’s neck between nuzzling kisses.

“My Father was a liar, a coward, a worthless God. He made and destroyed and remade with no thought to the consequences. He plotted and planned and gave His creations all these petty things to fight over, then got bored and abandoned them to destroy themselves, each other.

“He couldn’t admit His mistakes. He invented Evil and then renounced it as something other as though He couldn’t be responsible.”

Cas paused, layering Dean’s throat in warm breaths and soft lips. Only when he had worshipped and tasted every inch did he adjust his grip, taking the two of them together against his palm and stroking until Dean’s nails dug in to mark his back.

“He made beings so flawed they couldn’t help but break, and then blamed them for their faults. He made Lucifer. He made me.”

Dean tried to object again, presumably at the idea of Cas categorizing himself with Lucifer, but Cas hushed him tenderly because he was wrong. Cas was without doubt his Father’s greatest failure, because even Lucifer had fallen for love of God. Castiel had fallen for another love, one so unforgivable that his brothers tried to break him of it and, failing that, had reviled, exiled, and finally abandoned him when they departed for multiverses unknown to escape the Apocalypse they themselves had wrought. Proper angels, all of them, made in the Lord’s image far more accurately than humans could ever claim.

Shaking off the morose thoughts by losing himself in Dean’s mouth, Cas flexed to thrust himself against Dean within the slick cradle of his own hand. He released Dean’s tongue with regret, and only so that he could whisper in his ear, “He made you.

“And for that, for the one perfect thing He ever did, I forgive all the rest. If all His errors had to happen before He could bring you to me, they were all worth it.”

Dean’s breath shattered into an unsteady noise that had nothing to do with his tightly strung pleasure. The cry of longing sounded so wounded that Cas let himself hear in it the declarations Dean had never been able to make.

“It’s all right,” Cas soothed over the taut tendon of Dean’s neck, along the underside of his jaw.

“I know,” he promised the creases at the corners of Dean’s eyes and the lines of his forehead.

But Dean shook his head, slipped his hands gently into Cas’s hair until he could ease them apart enough to look up into Cas’s eyes. “I love you,” he said, and the words came out strong despite the throat voicing them sounding choked and unsteady.

It was too much to bear; for all Cas had spent years craving the sentiment, finally hearing it with Dean’s earnest gaze locked on him pieced the fragments of his heart back together only to break it into smaller, sharper shards. It was no surprise that fate was cruel enough to only give him this when he was too much of a wreck to be worthy, but it pained him just the same.

He closed his eyes and tried to turn his face away, but Dean held him steady, leaned in to kiss him softer and sweeter than he’d ever been touched before. It grounded him in a body that was equally his and not his while at the same time freeing him as nothing had since the first proud flush at learning he had been chosen to raise the righteous man from the pit.

For the immortal creature he had once been—an angel who should have known it was wrong to feel proud, should have realized then that his path could only ever have led him here—the intervening time was insignificant. It was only a single moment of consciousness in a memory that stretched back before the formation of the earth itself; nothing compared to the tides of glaciers and the growth of mountains, less even than the fleeting rise and fall of civilizations.

He’d let himself be destroyed in a few meaningless revolutions of a doomed planet around an uncaring star. Pressed into Dean, lips and chests and cocks warm as they slipped fluidly together, he regretted none of it.

“Yes,” he whispered, opening his eyes to accept the full force of Dean’s worship, less verbose but no less wholehearted than his own; and “always,” turning his head again because this time Dean permitted it, allowing Cas to kiss his palm, nibble and suck at his fingers.

Presently, Dean’s hand fell away from his face, reappearing to wrap over Cas’s around their joined erections. Both of them groaned at the contact, unsuccessfully trying to muffle the sounds with a sharing of lips. They held each other there, rocking together tentatively until they found a rhythm. The tatters of what Cas fervently hoped was his soul wrenched and rejoiced at the tenderness of it. He shouldn’t have one—it wasn’t right or possible—but he knew some kind of charred ember glowed in the void his angelic grace had left behind, and he clung to the selfish thought that just maybe something of him would survive this and get to see Dean again

They slid slick and hot against each other. Between increasingly breathless whispers of adoration, the only sounds sinking into the wooden cabin walls were faintly rustling sheets, slippery flesh moving within slippery flesh, and the gasps, hums, and wet, desperate kisses they couldn’t bear to contain.

Despite flooding with joy and desire, Cas’s mind was clearer than he could remember it being in years as he rode the sensation of Dean’s dick rubbing along the underside of his, Dean’s fingers interlaced to stroke and squeeze all around the rest. It was a slow, gently building pleasure, nothing like the overwhelming rush he’d grown accustomed to, and he reveled in the circumstances as much as the feeling itself.

Even after all this time, he could tell from Dean’s face that he was inching ever closer to the inevitable edge. Reluctant to allow their interlude to end, Cas still gave in and strengthened his rolling thrusts to bring them up and over together. He’d never been able to deny Dean.

Cas swallowed Dean’s cries, equally smothering his own into Dean’s mouth, as they spilled together into their clasped hands.

Kisses mellowed from passionate to slow and lingering until the heat of climax faded and they began to shiver in the cool air. Cas tried to pull away but was utterly unable to resist falling back in at Dean’s slight whimper of complaint.

Finally, when Cas’s extremities had stopped tingling from his orgasm only to start tingling all over again from lack of air as Dean claimed him with lips and tongue, Dean squeezed the back of his neck and drew back slowly. His face darkened with a heavy mix of sorrow and resignation that Cas knew must be reflected back in his own.

“It’s time,” Dean said softly. Though his voice was thick, it held no uncertainty; Dean had long ago mastered the art of practicality in the face of heartbreak.

Since Cas’s coping mechanisms tended more toward the profane than the stoic, he offered a crooked grin and a throaty chuckle and pointed out, “Time to go was right about when I got your pants off. Everything since then has just been”—he paused, searching for the right words in Dean’s eyes—“borrowed time.”

“Story of my life,” Dean muttered, partly bitter but just amused enough that Cas thought it would be all right to gently detach. He cast about for something to clean them, but reconsidered and began to lick the mess from his hand instead. Then, as Dean watched in shock, from Dean’s hand and the defined planes of his torso. It wasn’t the most pleasant of textures or flavors—their semen was cold and tacky, and their diets were atrocious—but it was something of Dean’s, something of theirs, that he could carry inside him until the last.

Just in case that implausible soul didn’t pull through after all.

Once that was done, Dean pushed himself up off the floor and pulled Cas in for one last kiss, sweet despite the acrid aftertaste of themselves and the situation. “Right,” was all he said. They dressed in silence.

Dean shrugged on his jacket last, his back to Cas and his head bent low. His shoulders hitched to get it into place and never again relaxed. Tilting his face to the side—not quite looking back, but revealing his troubled profile over his shoulder—he swallowed and Cas could trace the hard drop of his adam’s apple out of sight behind his stiff collar.

“Cas.” It came on the exhale, vulnerable beneath the rough scrape of it; he was a word away from breaking. If Cas asked him to, he’d walk away from all of it and the two of them could ride out the end of the world in each other’s arms.

The desire settled warm and heady in his chest, but he only let the dream carry him away for a single, unbearably fond heartbeat before he let it slip off to the same purgatory where all the nice ideas and fleeting hopes of self-preservation had been banished.

Dean would go with him, love him, be content with him—then their doubts would creep in again. Dean would realize the chance he gave up and resent Cas for damning the world and denying his vengeance. Or Cas would try to get sober for him and have to face a world in which he could always hear the silence where he should have been filled with song. He’d fail and Dean would be disgusted by him all over again.

Better to end it like this, nothing false left between them, all the truths shared in whispers that didn’t need to be repeated lest they ruin everything.

“The convoy’s probably ready by now,” he said instead.

Dean’s eyes closed, squeezed tight, opened. He nodded, jerky but decisive, and faced forward. “Let’s go.”

No one else in the world that had been or was—not Risa or Jane, not Zachariah, not even his own doppelgänger—could have seen the difference between the embittered man who had entered Cas’s cabin in search of a fight and the one who left, having found a fight and so much more. That honor was Cas’s alone. It, along with a throatful of herbal liquor on his way out the door, was enough to stretch a careless grin across his face as he followed Dean into the darkness.

**Author's Note:**

>  _When the stars threw down their spears_  
>  _And water’d heaven with their tears:_  
>  _Did he smile his work to see?_  
>  _Did he who made the Lamb make thee?_  
>  -"The Tyger," William Blake


End file.
